1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to electronic messaging systems and more particularly to notification systems for incoming messages in an electronic messaging system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging represents the single most useful task accomplished over wide-scale computer communications networks. Some argue that in the absence of electronic messaging, the Internet would have amounted to little more than a science experiment. Today, electronic messaging seems to have replaced the ubiquitous telephone and fax machine for the most routine of interpersonal communications. As such, a variety of electronic messaging systems have arisen which range from real-time instant messaging systems and wireless text pagers to asynchronous electronic mail systems.
Electronic mail, a form of electronic messaging referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties. Today, more e-mails are processed in a single hour than phone calls. Clearly, e-mail as a mode of communications has been postured to replace all other modes of communications save for voice telephony.
In the early days of computing, few participated in electronic messaging such that one could ascertain the presence of a new message simply by inspecting a directory of incoming messages. As the popularity of electronic messaging has grown over the years, however, notification systems have arisen to provide both audible and visual notifications when a new electronic message has been received. Importantly, the explosive use of electronic messaging systems has resulted in entirely separate applications having the sole purpose of managing the notification duties of an electronic messaging system.
For many computing users of electronic messaging systems, the volume of electronic messages received daily can be unmanageable and often can result in the recipient of a volume of electronic messages becoming overwhelmed. While in the past electronic messaging notification systems alerted end users to the receipt of a message, the frequent receipt of messages and resulting repetitive notifications can become irritating to the end user. In fact, oftentimes end user simply disable the notification system because there is nary a chance to review all incoming e-mails at once to determine which are important and which can be ignored for the time being. To do so, however, can cause important messages to go unnoticed.
Most electronic messaging users address the problem of excessive messaging by automating the processing of incoming messages. For instance, it is well known to apply rules to incoming messages in order to determine whether to automatically delete received messages, to file received messages in a particular location, to quarantine messages as “junk mail”, or to store received messages in an inbox. Still, the notification system remains unchanged in that all messages when received, regardless of the processing of the message, can result in a notification unless it is pre-determined to delete specified ones of the received messages. Accordingly, to suppress the notification for a received message, the message first must be deleted without affording the recipient an opportunity to review the message at a later time.